24hrs in Kathmandu

Keith visited Nepal 25 years ago and loved it. He was really keen to return during our trip. Originally, we planned to spend 7-10 days here to include trekking and white water rafting, but for various reasons; being short of time, these actives requiring quite a lot of ‘gear’ that we are not carrying and and being a bit concerned about the overall pace of our itinerary in Asia, we decided a few months ago to save this for a future, dedicated trip.

Our round the world ticket still required us to fly in and out of Kathmandu, so rather than absorb more cost to change this, we decided to spend 24hrs and experience as much as we could in a short space of time. I’ve cheated and used iPhone’s ‘memory making’ functionality which creates this video including most of the pics and little video clips from the day we spent walking around the city.

Sadly, Kathmandu is still reeling from the massive earthquake that struck exactly three years ago in April 2015. We knew this and so were a little prepared but it was still so depressing to see this struggling country on its knees and with such slow progress being made. There is debris everywhere, temporary scaffolding holding builds up and the dust pollution is terrible. I was warned about this by another travelling family and told to take masks but we didn’t manage to get ourselves organised and I woke the morning after our walk around the city with sore eyes and a sore throat. I can’t begin to imagine how terrible it must be for the people who are living and breathing this air day in and day out. It really broke my heart.

24hrs really isn’t long enough to get a feel for a country but I’m glad we did what we could. The highlight for the girls was getting an audience with the 3yr old ‘Living Goddess’ (I just felt sorry for her) and eating the ‘best chicken kebab of their lives’ and for me it was seeing the iconic prayer flags blowing in the breeze in Thamel and finally, as we took off on our flight to Delhi the next day, witnessing the spectacular scenery of the Himalayas white, snow-capped peaks jutting out above the clouds towards the sky.